1/15/2024 0 Comments Catch lightning in a bottle![]() Also, he never said that he was the one who did the experiment. But as his previous thought experiment was being replicated across the continent with great success, this was only of minor scientific interest and Franklin never really elaborated on it. ![]() In October of 1752, Franklin wrote a brief statement in the Pennsylvania Gazette saying that the iron rod experiment had been achieved in Philadelphia, but “in a different and more easy Manner,” with a kite. Here’s the tricky bit-there is a lot of doubt between historians as to whether or not Franklin ever conducted the experiment. When lightning struck, electricity traveled to the key and the charge was collected in a Leyden jar. Franklin stood outside under a shelter during a thunderstorm and held on to a silk kite with a key tied to it. It was exactly one month after the Dalibard experiment, on June 10, 1752, that Franklin (supposedly) performed his famous kite and key experiment. In Dalibard’s writing of his Paris experiment, he concluded that Franklin’s hypothesis was right. To test Franklin’s hypothesis, naturalist Thomas-Francois Dalibard used a large metal pole to conduct electricity from lightning on May 10, 1752. ![]() Little did Franklin know that his original letter to Collinson, once translated to French, was causing quite a stir in Paris. Instead, in 1752, he devised a new plan: sending a kite into the air. But Franklin didn’t feel that he could get his conductor high enough into the clouds to do any good, so he never completed the experiment. He not only hypothesized that lightning and electricity were linked, but that metal objects could be used to draw lightning in order to protect homes from being hit. It was during this time, in 1750, that Franklin sent Collinson a letter proposing an experiment that would draw lightning through a 30-foot rod. In this early phase of experimentation, Franklin concluded that electricity was fluid. Franklin investigated how charged objects interacted and came to the conclusion that lightning was merely a huge spark that was created by charged forces. So let’s clear things up.įounding Father/diplomat/inventor/innovator/Philadelphian/total cad Benjamin Franklin became interested in the field of electricity when his friend and fellow scientist Peter Collinson sent him an electricity tube. Sorry everyone, your childhood science teacher sort of lied to you. Nor was he the first scientist to study charged particles. Though Franklin is believed to have completed his lightning experiment, he wasn’t the first to do so. "Similar effects are probably important for understanding some other systems that are hard to do experiments on, like white dwarf stars.In elementary school, most of us were taught that Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by tying a key to a kite and standing in a thunderstorm. "Our new abilities may give a great opportunity to study those phenomena," Killian said. They also hope to further investigate the processes that occur inside the trapped plasma, such as how the ions and electrons could recombine or how energy and mass move through the system. ![]() Next, the researchers said they will design a laser grid that will plug any holes in the bottle's magnetic field through which ions could escape the experiment. If physicists can capture ultra-cold plasma in a bottle, they can study the behavior of plasma-composed stellar objects like white dwarfs, or begin to replicate the conditions for fusion inside the sun. The trapping technique opens up a wide range of avenues for plasma research. What's that? Your physics questions answered 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics Northern lights: 8 dazzling facts about auroras The paper's authors speculate that the magnetic field kept the electrons and ions from combining to form neutral atoms, and so kept the soup trapped in its plasma state. The picture they revealed was one where the fast-moving, low-mass electrons were tightly pinned to the magnetic field lines and spiraling around them, with the positive ions held inside the trap by their attraction to the negatively charged electrons. “We had to sort out all of those effects." to paint a picture of the plasma density and speed across the bottle over time. "On top of that, the magnetic field is varying in space all across the plasma,” said Killian. This is because the magnetic field changes how the ions scatter the laser light in very unpredictable ways. "We measure plasma properties by scattering light off the ions in the plasma, but the magnetic field really complicates that," Rice Dean of Natural Sciences and corresponding author Tom Killian told Live Science. The laser-cooled cloud of plasma expands rapidly inside the magnetic trap.
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